SunGard is one of the biggest names in the capital markets, so when they announce a corporate software selection, it's important news.
SunGard's VP of Liquidity Services, Chris Lees told Securities and Industry News: "One of the reasons why we thought about a CEP [is because] we were looking to make real-time decisions on what is effectively streaming data. CEP processing is very adapted to that space." He described why the SunGard selection demonstrates that CEP is going mainstream, from algo trading to dozens of applications, to trade equities, futures, fixed income and options. The platform will be used by SunGard's Assent Liquidity Services, which provides sponsored access, dark pool access and algorithmic trading services, and in conjunction with its Brass Order Management System (OMS). With over $3B in revenue and 20,000 customers in over 50 countries, SunGard is big, and they join RBC, City Index, CMC Markets, CME Group, PhaseCapital, BlueCrest, and others who have made the leap to CEP.
The authoring, testing, and debugging environment — StreamBase Studio — isn't just a graphical modeling tool (e.g., UML), and it's not just a code generation tool (e.g., Apama) — it's a complete, native, unified graphical programming environment. It's not just a modeling tool, it's not a code generation front-end. What you see is what you get.The best way we've been able to
describe it is as "whiteboard programming."
Every StreamBase customer uses this pure visual programming, and it's a new way of working because you generate applications more quickly, without sacrificing performance. And because there is no generated code, it's easier to maintain.
SunGard's endorsement of StreamBase confirms our 2010 prediction #3 for CEP, that cognitive physics will become as important as computing physics, where the speed of development is a central source of disruptive technology-driven business advantage.
UPDATE (4/6/2010)
The SunGard / StreamBase partnership was covered broadly, but there were a few angles, as usual, reported that my original post didn't highlight, including:
SunGard to build pre-trade risk tool on StreamBase
The Trade reported that SunGard will focus on developing pre-trade risk controls with StreamBase, a decision that was "prompted in part by the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposal to require brokers offering clients direct access to exchanges, including sponsored access, to impose pre-trade risk checks."
They reported that pre-trade risk controls would involve validating incoming orders against market data, for example, to check for errors or anomalies. “You end up with a requirement for completing quite a complex set of calculations in a very short window of time, because you don’t want to delay getting the order to the market while using a lot of streaming data,” Chris Lees, vice president of liquidity services at SunGard, told theTRADEnews.com. “For us, that is the perfect sweet-spot for StreamBase’s event processing platform.”
Read the full article in The Trade here.
SunGard to Buy StreamBase?
Acquisition rumors are a natural part of the software business, and Adam Honore' kicked it off in his blog. I addressed the question here in my blog, and Finextra picked up the whole thread here. The rumor is all over Twitter.
My remarks in the comments below stand, and I would add that if you compare StreamBase as a platform to the relational database, you see why its a good thing when an industry establishes a defacto platform. The business fuels the innovation and maturity of the leader, and all participants benefit. SunGard, and our many other customers, begin to compete on the efficacy of their use of the CEP platform, not just the fact that they are using it.
